According to modern anthropology, Africa is the birthplace of
mankind, but it is also the birthplace of mining activity. The
oldest mine ever discovered is located in Africa, on a Swaziland
iron site and was operated as long ago as 45,000 years! Nine
thousand years before the Christian era copper metallurgy was
developed in Mesopotamia, and around 1500 BC iron was produced in
Asia Minor. The use of gold as a currency or in traditional
handicraft was known elsewhere long before it extended to Africa.
Yet, like copper or gold, iron was used by Africans from time
immemorial. For example, both red haematite or black iron oxide
were used as cosmetics or in funeral ceremonies. In many places
gold was traditionally used in making masks and other ornaments,
especially at the time of the great empires of Mali, Ghana or
Songhai; and Ancient Egypt, of course, represents the golden age
of copper civilization.

When Europeans began to venture into Africa they frequently
found a fairly developed iron metallurgy; and Livingstone, for
example, was surprised to find that the Mozambican blacksmiths
considered British iron to be of a poor quality compared to local
iron.

Though Africa has a long tradition of mining and metallurgy,
its modern mineral story began only with the diamond rush in
Southern Africa, at the turn of the twentieth century.

European colonization of South America was, from the
beginning, linked to the exploitation of precious metals - gold
and silver - but in Africa, mercantilist capitalism was for
centuries based rather on plundering human resources through the
slave trade, and wealth underground was neglected. Large scale
mining in Africa coincided with the early 'Leninist' stage of
imperialism, based on banking and industrial monopolies, on
capital exports and on the violent conquest of the world by the
big European powers.

The first diamond rush began around 1870 in Southern Africa,
which was already a settler's colony. It rapidly attracted a host
of prospectors, smugglers and speculators as had the Californian
gold rush two decades earlier; but these independent adventurers
were supported and manipulated by British imperialism. At this
time the main mining companies which were to dominate the local
scene for 100 years were established: Rio Tinto-Zinc, De Beers,
Consolidated Gold Fields for example, with people like Barnato or
the more famous Cecil Rhodes. These 'Randlords' soon made huge
profits, often in excess of invested capital and thanks to their
close ties with Britain and European financial centres, gained
power and prestige.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Cecil Rhodes, who owned
the De Beers diamond company and Consolidated Gold Fields had
founded the British South Africa Company (BSA) which was to play
a leading role in the colonization of central Africa. Patterned
on the seventeenth-century chartered companies, BSA invested the
profits it derived from its mining activities to build a colonial
infrastructure north of the Transvaal, and induced British
immigrants to settle on the newly occupied lands in order to
increase the value of its investments. Until the mid-1920s, when
the British administration took over, BSA ruled the territories
of Zimbabwe and Zambia (then Southern and Northern Rhodesia).
Truncated agreements with the local chiefs granted mining
concessions to the British South Africa Company in all the
territories it ruled; these concessions were readily confirmed by
the British government. Later, BSA granted an exclusive
prospecting licence to two mining enterprises owned by British,
American and South African interests. Only in 1964, when Zambia
became independent, were the concession rights transferred to the
Zambian government against a 'compensation' of £2 million.

This pattern of granting concessions whereby colonization was
organized by private mining companies with the support, and on
behalf of the imperial state, was not limited to British Central
and Southern Africa, but applied also to the Belgian Congo.
There, the Katanga Mining Company ruled the territory in exchange
for an exclusive mining concession granted by the Belgian state
which derived its 'rights' in the Congo from the Berlin
Conference of 1885.

From the turn of the twentieth century up to the 1930s, mining
activity in Africa - with the exception of Ghana (gold) and
Sierra Leone (diamonds) was concentrated mainly in the south. But
colonial expansion in Africa was not limited to the search for
minerals and, after the slave trade ended, spread to include land
occupation, food production and, more generally, the acquisition
of large zones of influence by the European powers. Early in the
twentieth century the whole of Africa, with the exception of
Ethiopia, was under colonial domination. But it was investment in
mining, attracting huge amounts of capital and mobilizing masses
of labourers, that had the greatest impact on indigenous
societies - even in Zambia, where there was no white settlement.

Mining activity before the 1930s was based mainly on diamonds
and golds, that is, on metals with little productive use in the
metropolitan economies of Europe. Though closely tied to
financial capital, mining investment was therefore unrelated to
the general conditions of production in the Western countries. If
it can be said to represent the Leninist stage of imperialism,
mineral exploitation played precisely the same role in Africa as
had the exploitation of precious metals in South America during
sixteenth and seventeenth century mercantilism. Mining
production, supplying gold for the needs of the international
monetary system, provided the basis of very rapid financial
accumulation. With no direct link with industry, mining activity
had a quasi-speculative character, especially as the extraction
of precious metals required very simple techniques and equipment
and very short periods of capital immobilization.

During the 1930s, some changes began to take place, with the
exploitation of industrial minerals, especially copper; the
development of mining investment outside Southern Africa; and the
coming of new investors. But because of the reverberations of the
late 1920s economic crisis and increasing tensions in Europe
these changes were to become effective only after the Second
World War, in the 1950s and 1960s. During that time copper
extraction in Zambia and Zaire reached very high levels, and
production of other minerals - such as iron ore in Liberia,
bauxite in Guinea and uranium in Namibia and Niger - also
increased. A growing number of countries were forced to base
their economies specifically on mining in order to meet the needs
of the European metropoles. With a pattern of economic growth
based on the mass production of capital goods, consumer durables
and growing militarization, the advanced capitalist countries
demanded ever-increasing quantities of metals and of energy, and
between 1950 and 1975, world demand for metals was considerable.
For example, it has been estimated, that during that period the
metal consumption of the United States alone was higher than the
whole world consumption from prehistoric times up to 1940!

Demand increased very heavily not only for such basic metals
as copper, iron and bauxite-aluminium, but also for rare metals
such as platinum, chromium and titanium, which were needed mainly
by industries involved in aeronautics, space exploration, nuclear
power and electronics. Despite the emergence of newly
industrialized countries in the East and the South, world demand
for minerals is heavily concentrated in the West and in Japan.
The intense industrialization in these areas could not have been
achieved had it been based solely on their own domestic mineral
resources. But mineral exploitation in the Third World was
stimulated not only by their abundance and high quality; a more
important factor for Western and Japanese capitalists is the
profitability based on cheap local labour and the expropriation
of local property rights without compensation - conditions not
available in developed countries.

Initially based on the extraction of gold and diamonds, mining
in Africa today is centred on four basic minerals; copper, iron,
bauxite and uranium, although the extraction of rare and precious
metals is still of considerable importance in South Africa. These
four basic minerals are essential for modern industries in
whatever social and economic system they operate. Copper, which
is the oldest, is widely used in the electrical and electronic
industries; after silver, it is the best conductor metal per unit
of volume. It is also needed in the production of capital and
consumer goods. the construction sector and in vehicle
manufacturing. The modern uses of iron are closer to its
traditional ones, such as tool-making and construction works.
Aluminium is the symbol of modern metallurgy and it
characteristics make it a good substitute for both iron and
copper. Low density, high conductivity and great strength
compared to weight favour its use in various sectors such as
transport, communications, construction, engineering and food
industries. Uranium has a specific status as it is exclusively a
source of energy, apart, of course, from its military use.
Nuclear energy, which was quite marginal a few years ago, today
produces between 10% and 60% of electricity in the Western
countries.

Copper, iron and aluminium are, as it were, the metal basis of
the growth pattern experienced in developed countries since the
1950s. And, in spite of the contemporary economic crisis which
drastically reduced the growth of metal consumption, these metals
still play an essential role in the economic systems of developed
countries. Rapid industrial growth in the Third World and in
Socialist countries over the last 20-30 years provides a new and
important source of increased metal consumption. Meanwhile, the
demand for uranium, at least in the West, increased considerably
with the policies of diversification of energy sources induced by
the oil price rise. The use of uranium for electricity production
is rapidly expanding throughout the world.

It is now commonplace to praise the achievements of modern
technology, but without the warnings of the Club of Rome and the
increasing concern of other institutions and individuals about
the progressive depletion of the earth's natural resources the
fact that this technology is built on a mineral basis would have
almost been forgotten. Large quantities of uranium, aluminium and
rare metals are needed for alloys; but 'prehistoric' minerals,
such as iron and copper, are equally indispensable for the
conquest of space as for the knowledge of elementary particles.
In the advanced countries, these metals provide the framework of
an increasingly sophisticated system of production and
consumption; while in Third World countries which export them.
they represent a great historical opportunity.